Analyzing ATE interconnect performance for serial links of 10 Gbps and above

This paper describes a method for analyzing the performance of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) Device Interface Boards (DIB) for High-Speed Serial Link interface. The procedure requires using only the device under test (DUT) to generate known PRBS TX data and an ATE digitizer to capture the waveform. The information of impulse and frequency response of the signal path can then be obtained by processing this waveform. In addition, data-dependent and periodic jitter can also be calculated. Therefore, without the use of other sophisticated hardware setup, this approach can validate the performance of the fixtures required for testing 10 Gbps Serial Link interfaces and help to identify any signal integrity issues. The proposed method can process waveform data from any instrument and, therefore, can be exploited to analyze signals above 10 Gbps, being limited only by the bandwidth of the instrument itself.